I have been investing ( wasting ) a lot of time in understanding crypto currency and everything involved with it. Yes by now i know the meaning of HODL, FUD, FOMO etc. Also I ended up creating a facebook group called : TheCoinMill where we help people get started with crypto currency.

After getting involved in it for few months call i can say is that in 2018 ICOs ( Initial Coin Offerings ) will become the next big thing and why not ? its beneficial for companies to get started by getting crowd fund and also it is beneficial for investors too. Here in ICOs anyone can invest from as little as $10 to and amount that you can afford.

Here are the details of few ICOs which gave excellent Returns in 2017 :

1. WABI - almost 21 times reutns in about 1 month. Means if you would have invested Rs 10,000 you would have got Rs 2.1 lacs in 1 month

2. ICON - 100 times returns in 3 months. Do the calculation yourself.

Now because of all these reasons a lot of people are getting into ICOs as it is quick money ( most of the time ). I agree there are lot of scams going on in the name of ICO but these days we have experts who help people choose the genuine one.

One such ICO was Experty ICO. Here is a video which explains what they are trying to do

Now this ICO is a genuine one with an excellent team and roadmap. They have their sale on 31st January and they have a goal to rise $10,000,000. They earned a good reputation in the market and got around 20,000 members in their official telegram group.

But something terrible happened last night. Hackers hacked their server and they got access to details of all the participants who whitelisted to their ICO.

The Impact

Generally when we take part in ICOs we need to first whitelist our-self where we need to give our name, email ID, password, ETH address where we will receive the tokens, Passport copy etc

When experty's website got hacked hackers got all the above mentioned details of all participants. Today they started sending mails to all the registered participants where they asked them to send their ETH to a specific address in order to take part in ICO. This address belonged to the Hacker and not Experty. Most of the participants believed it as it looked genuine and everyone started sending ETH to this address.

email with ETH address sent by the hacker to participants

In the last 12 hours the address ( hacker's address ) received almost 108 ETH which is almost $120,000

This is something we really need to worry about. As ICOs are getting popular, a lot of scammers and hackers are getting into it as it is easy to scam people here. The biggest problem is that all these transactions happens in cryptocurrencies so it is almost impossible to catch the hacker and this is the reason why many scams takes place.

Also Companies doing ICOs should take these things seriously because it is seen that most of the time their sites are not that secure . They aim to get million dollars from ICOs but don't spend money in security and other stuffs. We have seen during TheKey ICO how they fail to handle traffic during the sale and their website was down for more than 10 hours during the sale. People give away their personal details like copy of passport, phone number etc so if these information are compromised then people might face a lot of trouble in future.